Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where's the AI design Renaissance?

learnui.design

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 90 posts

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#41

Post by couchdb_ouchdb »

"After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster"

This is antidotally untrue. I work for a small startup. We don't have the money / aren't willing to pay for a full-time designer. So, let's just say, our UI design has always been pretty terrible. With AI, using claude, to generate design and HTML / CSS based on requirements, the design that has been generated has been heads and tails better than anything we ever came up with alone.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#42

Post by BoorishBears »

donpedrito wrote: post #34
scuff3d wrote: post #25

> My hunch: vibe coding is a lot like stock-picking – everyone’s always blabbing about their big wins. Ask what their annual rate of return is above the S&P, and it’s a quieter conversation Best summary I've heard so far

[flagged]

the tone is bad, but the sentiment is accurate.

vibes coding is massively saturated with early model-access poasters who define the narrative on each release.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#43

Post by squid_fm »

levmiseri wrote: post #22

Lots of these discussions are simplifying design to 'making things look pretty'. That's just not true for even the more visual-based design disciplines like graphic design. And the 'regular' product design (ux/ui/ixd) happening in most tech companies has very little of this compared to the rest of the scope of what a designer really does. Product design isn't a layer that you apply. It's not an output of some prompt.…

I’m a product designer and this is what I’ve noticed:

- When I use AI to vibe-code, it gives me a usable result but I personally have no idea if the output is “correct”. I am not sure if there are security vulnerabilities, I don’t know what is actually happening under the hood to make it work, etc.

- When my engineering friends use AI to vibe-design, I notice the same pattern. It looks “designed” but there are obvious usability issues, pattern mismatches for common user goals, and the UI lacks an overall sense of polish.

Basically, my takeaway is that AI is great for spinning things up quickly but it is not a replacement for fundamentals or craft.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#44

Post by coolKid721 »

jampa wrote: post #13

LLMs are architected to aim toward the center of the bell curve of their training data. You shouldn't expect them to produce innovative ideas, but the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones. The same applies to design. Most of the time, you get something that "doesn't suck", which is perfectly fine for projects where using a designer isn't worth it, like internal corporate pages. But consumer-facing pages re…

LLMs don't produce ideas they implement them, anyone who is relying on LLM produced ideas basically doesn't matter the whole point is they make people who want to design interesting stuff have a lower barrier to entry of actually producing stuff.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#45

Post by BoorishBears »

lateforwork wrote: post #40

> After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster This does not match my experience. I have been using Claude for speeding up design. Describe your page and ask it to use Tailwind and it will come up with some interesting designs. You still need a designer because some designs it comes up with are over the top, and need to be moderated.

Most designers I've worked with don't want Tailwind slop as a starting point.

At most AI prototypes and images serve the role that a whiteboard drawing or wireframe did before: that's a win, but it's not an monumental change in efficiency.

I ironically think AI is already there in terms of being capable of more, but no one has built the right harnesses for AI.

Loose tailwind classes and shadcn is not it.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#49

Post by mwigdahl »

monooso wrote: post #14
mwigdahl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a gross overgeneralization of the content of the actual study paired with a bizarre analogy. You do you, but I disagree completely.

Could you expand on your criticism? OP stated that: > Developers who use AI think they're quicker and better, but they're actually slower and worse. You responded that this is a "gross overgeneralization of the content of the actual study", but the study appears to back up the original statement. To quote the summary: > When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant…

> Could you expand on your criticism?

Sure! The study focused on experienced devs working in complex codebases they already knew thoroughly. This was and is the worst case for using AI tooling from a cold start, _particularly_ AI tooling as it existed at the time.

There were also only 16 developers involved in the study.

Time has passed since the study and we've had an entirely new class of tool introduced (the agentic CLI a la Claude Code) as well as two subsequent generations of model improvement (Sonnet 3.7 to Sonnet 4 to Sonnet 4.5). Given that the results of the METR study were stated as an eternal, unqualified truth, the fact that tooling and models are much superior now compared to when the study was conducted is worth noting as well.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#50

Post by BoorishBears »

donpedrito wrote: post #46
BoorishBears wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the tone is bad, but the sentiment is accurate. vibes coding is massively saturated with early model-access poasters who define the narrative on each release.

[flagged]

Admit it. You're the guy they have post-training on SVG pelican generation for human preference...
Post reply on HN